This year, Toronto has been reviled and shunned -- even more so than normal. Chronically resented by the rest of the nation, the past months have seen the city scarred by SARS and its aftermath (it seems being Torontonian has become a contagious disease), blacked out for a weekend, forced to play second fiddle on the Olympics to its pretty baby sister Vancouver, haunted by pedophilic gym-bag-toting psychopaths, and threatened with swarms of virus-infected mosquitoes. (Since when have we had to be afraid of the bird bath in the garden?) Let's just say we're looking forward to 2004.
It is therefore balm to the Torontonian soul to see an exhibition -- no matter how small -- that reminds us of the special charms of the T-dot. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it took an outsider's eye to see it -- in this case, the eye of Markus Muller, curator of contemporary art at the Westfalische Landesmuseum in Munster, Germany, and former communications director of Documenta. Muller was invited by the Toronto artist-run centre YYZ to create a group show. He, in turn, put out a call to Toronto artists, inviting them to respond to the idea of the psychotope, a term, he says, coined by the Austrian architect Richard Neutra in his 1995 book Survival Through Design. Neutra describes the psychotope as an object to which one applies long term affection, whether it be a landscape, memory or person. Or, I suppose, a city. And affection is just what we need these days. Muller's exhibition shows us how to love this place again.
Olia Mischenko and Steve Kado's It's Time for a Little TO feels emblematic of the city under siege -- a little shelf on which we find a make-it-snow shaker, a tourist T-shirt, and a coffee mug all bearing the image of an imaginary Great Wall of Toronto. The proposed edifice would be built to encircle the downtown core of the city. But would that wall be built to keep invaders out, or inmates in? Either way, it speaks of the special sense of dread we felt this year: our city as urban gulag.
Other works document heroic efforts to shrug off Hogtown's dire Protestant restraint. On this score, Day Milman and Paige Gratland's video Free Dance Lessons is strangely satisfying. Setting up their boom box on the corner of Bay and Bloor on a Saturday afternoon in winter, the artists and their friends were at least able to entice the odd wacko grandmother or stray hockey fan from Buffalo to get down. But the Monday-morning scene at the St. George subway was another matter. Here the locals are all grim resolve and twitching jaw muscles. It tells you everything you need to know about the way this city gets into harness.
Corwyn Lund's video Swingsite reveals the lengths an urban soul will go to to find a little release amid the pigeon droppings and recycling bins. The tape shows the artist entering a very tight alleyway between two brick downtown buildings, scaling the space between them with the deftness of a rock climber and installing a swing, which he suspended from a temporary metal bracket. Lund then climbs down and sets about swinging, flying forward and back in the narrow space, and we feel his zoom and fall, zoom and fall. Lund's approach? You work with what you've got, and you make it fly. (Let that be a lesson to us all!)
Speaking of urban squalor, it's hard to believe that the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto could ever be redeemed by art, but such are the gifts of Rose Kallal. She is showing a pair of wonderfully moody photographs of the grim interior, which has all the charm of an East German munitions factory. In her pictures, it looks ruggedly handsome, in a brutal sort of way. As well, Kallal is screening an eerie new video featuring the expressionless artist herself -- clad in her long, dark pea coat and mane of dead-straight blond hair -- prowling the library's bunker-like ramparts like a science-fiction cyborg. All I can say is, we've all been there. It's called February.
While the show is mostly concerned with emerging artists, there are a few senior statesmen in the mix, like Robin Collyer, who is showing his 2002 Kennel (a pressed-fibre replica of a Neutra residence re-imagined as a Guantanamo Bay detention cell), and John Massey, whose contributions to the show address the question of identity head on. Two photos from his recent soldiers series show images of toy men of war (one a Viking, the other an Etruscan warrior) digitally superimposed against a backdrop of all-Canadian forest and sea -- emblems of Toronto's ambiguous place between the New and Old World order.
His I Love Paris video, in which vanishing trans-Canada railway freight cars carry away the lyrics to the famous Cole Porter tune, has a more melancholy tone, suggesting a pining for escape to European romance and charm. Corrine Carlson strikes a similar note with her jazzy Alright, OK, You Win a video that couples the glamorous Peggy Lee song with images of scruffy used-car lots in downtown Toronto. When Peggy Lee sings "Okay," or "All right," her lyrics are paired up with the image of a car lot sign that reads the same. It may not sound like much in the telling, but the contrast of sound and image here is in fact delicately ironic. It's so hick it's hip.
Jay Wilson, though, scores the top prize in the category of Wistful Longing, with his recent video Singing Somewhere, Realized. In this curious and spellbinding little work, we observe the artist roaming the laneways, weed-infested backlots and abandoned stairwells of downtown Toronto singing the word "somewhere" -- over and over again in a yearning, tender lament. (For the most part, he faces away from the camera, as if in an inward trance.) Does he wish to be somewhere else? Or does he know he is somewhere, but is not quite sure where that somewhere is?
Wilson lays a gentle hand, here, on Toronto's troubled soul, evoking a nagging sense of displacement and confusion. There are a lot of crosscurrents here to contend with: we're whipsawed between Europe and America, and between the U.S. and Europe. We're a no-longer-white city exploding into a rainbow. We're making the dramatic shift -- ready or not -- from world-class Hicktown to serious international metropolis, finally committing ourselves to the reality of urban life. (There's no turning back to the cabin in the woods now.) We are, in short, a city on the move, and Wilson's fractured song embodies our search for a redemptive sense of place. Exactly what kind of a somewhere is Toronto?
This could be our anthem.
Psychotopes continues until Oct. 18 at YYZ, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 140, Toronto. For information call 416-598-4546.